AOL backed streampad.com has a blog player, that sits on the bottom of the page and plays the blog you’re browsing.
Recently, they made some changes, including a pop-out feature. If they’re smart, they’re trying to get the user off the blog, and into their own radio-player app, where the blogs are just content curators.
Posted 1 year ago
Last.fm pioneered the idea of recording every track everyone plays. It’s good for music and data nerds who want to see their tastes evolve over time, but it’s not so great for actually finding new good music.
Facebook has made it a goal to give users more “realtime serendipity.” This is a good thing, as I’ve said in the past. In music, discovering, “Hey, you listen to ____, too!” is a powerful way to connect people. But the way Facebook is going about prompting serendipity is obviously just playing catchup to what they see working on Turntable, ie answering “What are people listening to RIGHT NOW?!”
They’re being distracted by “plays”.
What we didn’t need Facebook Music to be was a never ending feed of “Johny is listening to X” that overwhelms everything else on the platform. People play all kinds of music they don’t care about, all the time.
What we need is an easy way to listen to the music our friends go out of their way to give extra love to.
Show me tracks they Love, Star, Thumbs up or add to playlists. Those are the songs that didn’t just get played, but were good enough to catch my friends’ attention and make them switch tabs and click, effectively, “This song is good. Would recommend.”
That is music worth sharing.
Posted 1 year ago
How useful can a service that provides music recommendations be, when it only considers a few of your friends, and only a portion of each friend’s music profile? Not very useful.
This was, previously, a barrier stopping any music discovery service from doing what it was meant to: Find you good music.
Facebook has just moved music discovery forward by:
What Facebook Music can do better:
Posted 1 year ago
Someone you know tells you about an album they liked. You listen to it, enjoy a song and share it with another friend whom you think will enjoy it.
What you’re doing is flowing music through the connections that tie you to the people you know.
Anytime a song gets shared, a number of people may find and listen to it, but only the times the song is enjoyed does that flow continue and the song get shared to the next group of people.
These chains sharing and influence are going to be an important way to look at how music is discovered. What we were missing was a way to see our friend’s music discoveries, regardless of service. Bringing all this data together is the most interesting thing I see coming out of Facebook Music.
Posted 1 year ago
To nail it, Facebook needs this music discovery to be easy, play good music & help people feel connected to their friends through the music they have in common.
Posted 1 year ago
Tagged with facebook music facebook discovery new apps
Spotify’s social tool allows users to explore what their friends are listening to. For the past few years, this has largely been the job of music bloggers. Is my music blog obsolete?
As a music blogger, I’m worried. As a music fan, I’m excited.
Jordan Feldstein answers:
Your current readership won’t leave. Spotify helps because it makes sharing (and having music shared at you) easy. Your readers aren’t about easy. They’re about freshness, and about their trust of you as a source. They’ll stay. In fact, they may follow more closely, and find more blogs to read, in an effort to act as a curator of the blogs they like, funneling the music they like most into Spotify in an effort to build their own following.
You may develop new readership. Current non-blog-readers will begin to see other Spotify users sharing new good music and, wanting to contribute but not knowing how to find good spotify users from whom they can reshare good music, will reach out to music blogs for inspiration.
The question you should be asking yourself is: “How can you make yourself more easily found and digested?” Potential blog readers who, having started with something like Spotify, demand ease of use. They’ll read your blog over someone else, as long as you don’t make them work for it.
Posted 1 year ago
Haven’t read this yet. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when you piss off the RIAA, and as a reminder of how quickly things are changing. Since then, Spotify has gotten labels considering non-traditional licensing deals and turntable is poised get the music industry thinking about the future.
Malhotra is VP of Operations at turntable.fm. His post sells turntable’s story pretty hard, but I also agree with him. At the heart of the story:
While Turntable can be a very engaging experience, there is also a passive use case. Turntable wouldn’t just be a game that a user played for 20-30 minutes a day; it could be a service users listen to for hours on end.
Malhotra recognizes that, in order to be a real music discovery app, and not just a gamified web-app for music nerds, turntable needs to accomodate passive listening. (Respond in comments: If you use turntable, do you actively chat/DJ? Can you work with turntable in the background without being distracted?) Anecdotally, I’ve found that most people who start using turntable do so excitedly, until they realize they didn’t want a new hobby; at which point. they go back to listening to Pandora.
A service at this scale would build a significant social music taste graph.
Imagine if every time a song played, you could identify in real-time who heard the song, who liked it, their level of influence, and their social graph and then target them with a relevant marketing message/offer.
ie. Turntable’s data would let them understand people’s music preferences in ways nobody else has to data to match. At least the people and the music that’s common on the app. There’s probably money in there somewhere.
Could Turntable be licensed globally? Under the status quo, its seems unlikely.
Billy Chasten mentioned global licensing several times during his talk at TechCrunch Disrupt 2011. Seems like it’s still an area of contention for them, and still their intention to be the ones to change the status quo.
A new approach should start with the following assumption: “If we do right by the consumer, it will benefit us in the long-run”.
What a thought.
Justin Oullette, the creator of Muxtape offered these stats, from the first 24-hours:
8,685 users / 19,731 songs / 35,000 visits
—
http://weblog.muledesign.com/2008/03/muxtape.php
I wonder what the analogous stats were for the early days of turntable
Posted 1 year ago
With a nod to Last.fm’s Scrobbling, let’s talk about the number of services there are to find and enjoy music.
Grooveshark, Mog, Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, Pandora, etc the list goes on.
Each one of these does a fine job of suggesting music your friends enjoy, but all make the same fatal assumption: They only work if your friends use the same service.
What we need is an easy way to listen to the best music our friends are finding on any other service.
Posted 1 year ago
